'Black Swan' Writer Taleb Downplays North Korean Nuclear Threat

Nassim Taleb says people are concerned with the wrong geopolitical risks.

Rather than North Korea and the possibility that it may fire a nuclear missile at Guam or the continental U.S., the author of “The Black Swan” argues that terrorism and pandemics pose greater risks to the U.S.

“Nuclear is something we’re good at, the military’s good at,” Taleb, a scholar specializing in randomness, probability and uncertainty, said Tuesday in a Bloomberg Television interview in New York. “But we’re horrible, it turned out to be, at fighting militias, terrorists. That we’re not good at -- fighting ISIS.”